Blue Tears 2005
Silo Espaço Cultural for the Centre for Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal.
Multimedia installation by Russell Mills, Ian Walton and Mike Fearon
Commissioned by the Fundação de Serralves, Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto
X-rays, rusted corrugated metal sheets, two single channel DVD films (skull/head 38 minutes, hands 17 minutes 52 seconds), two DVD projectors, five light boxes, sand, lighting, asynchronous six CD players, 12 speakers surround sound system. Films by Russell Mills and Ian Walton; edited by Russell Mills and Mike Fearon: with thanks to Frank Carroll.
Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents take place. For those who, with the inhabitants, are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographic but also biographical and personal.
– John Berger, A Fortunate Man
Allen Lane The Penguin Press, London 1967.
When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.
– Wislawa Szymborska, The Three Oddest Words,
New York Times Magazine (1 December 1996), p. 49.
The richest events occur in us long before the soul perceives them. And, when we begin to open our eyes to the visible, we have long since committed ourselves to the invisible.
– Gabrielle d’Annunzio, Contemplation de la Mort 1928.
esse et percipi – to be is to be perceived
– Bishop Berkeley
Blue Tears explored the contrasts and/or comparisons observed in the temporary and the fixed. A work of gazes and of dialogues, the installation was concerned with vision and the penetration of darkness as metaphors for our most intimate concerns. It was a work of remembrance and of witness in the ceaseless, torrential flux of time. It sought to reflect on the possibilities of the animate, organic, seemingly order-less havoc of nature and the conversion of these energies into new visual, audio and conceptual contours.
Blue Tears is a term used to describe tears that cannot be stemmed, despite all efforts, tears that flow in extreme emotional states. As a title it also references the paradoxical characteristics of salt, the main component of tears, and time; both are preserver and destroyer.
A Blue Tear is a slowly floating cloak of particles. Stillness spiralling into life: a universe made light. An aerial array of luminous powder, older than memory, whirling, blown on the wind. Penetrating all spheres, weaving all knowing signs, hieroglyphs to the eye. Like a shoal of silver fish, shape-changing surf of shine, it heaves, crests and pivots in a blink, as one. Or as the granular enfolding of a flock of birds, a mantle blackening the sky. Moving through our sleep like the sea’s insistent breathing, a connoisseur of the hidden, its blind fingers feelsees over sleeping slate, stone and metal. Creep of now, lighter than itself, it etches a dappled membrane, carving a glowing tracery the gold of marmalade to red of furnace: an indelible ferric rebus.
A Blue Tear is an irrevocable law, an unceasing relay of assemblage and dissolution. It quivers between the certain sheer of the cliff and the swirling blue unknown below, between light and the abyss. A shuddering of the minute before the massive; the world’s gradual instant, as it glimmers, it vanishes. Mineral mother matrix holding signs of life in rock, messages of the dead encoded in stone, it is the geology of objects defined by the space in them.
A Blue Tear divides the world. Suspended in the void between fingers reaching to touch fingers, or where eye mirrors eye. Invisible it reveals the visible. It knows only edges and the space between a shadow and its host. An alignment of signs, invisibly co-ordinating movement from this place to another, from that moment to this, its breathing is felt as it passes and parts the air.
A Blue Tear moves moon-slow or with the whirr and scissors’ sharp, sure slice of a camera’s shutter. It defines a natural pause, an interval between two or more phenomena occurring simultaneously. It moves, is fluid, looking to change the static, neither still nor stirring but touching all into meaning.
A Blue Tear is immune to the moon yet it is pulled by the poles. Vapour once ocean, it defies the tides from which it explodes. In an instant it flies, wingless, drifting, in negative shimmering with a spectral aura, its own shadow seen in reverse: the mirror’s ghost seeking to surface as skin.
A Blue Tear is a sentient lens telescoping time. It crouches silently in the dark corners of rooms, defining the points of the compass. Living in darkness or hugging the hearth, it is held in a world of shadows, willing captive in the hush of history, grounded in the familiar embrace of home, where life is lived. It shouts in whispers of moments salvaged from time passing, memories dense with meaning.
A Blue Tear is both form and shape-shifter. It is a secret made external, an outside that is inside, a secretion, the internal made external. Seeping from within, wanting to roll back into its eye it slips its meniscus lip, and tips. Withheld until it can no longer, it escapes to a resisting world. As it falls it sculpts bowls from stones.
A Blue Tear is filled with signs of the ephemeral; manifestations in a cycle, fixing and solidifying, it freezes movement. Unseeing it senses the moment of movement: the fading and wilting of flowers; shadows cast on water and the flickering moments of the soul as the last thin breath plumes, ascending. Colours painted by light, bleached or eroded by the rain, transfigured by time, anticipating destruction in slow motion on the journey to extinction. Transformed from one state to another, it gradually fades objects into shadow stains of themselves.
The Silo Espaço Cultural
The Silo Espaço Cultural is an innovative exhibiting space, conceived especially for the Norteshopping, the largest shopping centre in Northern Portugal, situated in the Senhora de Hora district of Oporto. Designed by the Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto Moura and opened to the public in 1999, it is a 12 metres diameter, 2 storeys high, open cylindrical building. The ground floor is 5 metres high and the first floor is 15 metres high, capped by a circular convex clear glass roof. Stairs at one side of the building link the two floors. The Silo Espaço Cultural is linked to the Norteshopping centre by a wide corridor, which is also used as part of the exhibiting space, thereby conjoining the exhibiting space and the public, retail space, encouraging public inclusion.
The installation
Corridor Entrance
A long wall was clad in corrugated metal sheets. At the shopping mall entrance the sheets were pristine, becoming progressively more corroded as one moved along the corridor towards the Silo. Along the opposite wall and spaced equidistantly along the floor, were 5 x 44 cm square light boxes, each facing up. Emerging from a mound of salt crystals, they revealed montages of X-Rays. Lights covered in triple layered amber and gold gels, soaked the whole area in a golden glow.
Top Floor/Entry Level
From floor to a height of approximately 18’, a 28’ section of the curved wall was clad with sheets of rusted corrugated metal, in varying states of corrosion, patinated by the saline sea air of the Oporto climate. A film was projected onto the metal-clad wall creating a slowly changing veil of imagery. A succession of X-rays of human skulls blending almost imperceptibly into images of a nearly static man’s head, his face etched with history, eyes opening and closing in extreme slow motion: perceiver being perceived; consciousness made visible. The skull X-rays and the head emerged out of and disappeared into the metal sheeting over extended periods of time, suggesting the uneasy symbiosis between the environment and our habitation within it.
Lower Level
Mirroring the configuration of metal sheets on the top floor, from floor to a height of approximately 16’ covering an area of approximately 28’ wide was a gridded wall of over 700 X-rays of human skulls. A film projected onto the wall of X-rays showed a pair of hands scarred and lined with a history of physical labour moving through a series of symbolic gestures. Clasping they signified union, folded they represented repose and immobility, crossed at the wrists, binding or being bound, clenched, threat and aggression. As with the skulls and head, they slowly dissolved into and out of the skull X-rays over prolonged periods of time, alluding to both the neural and the cultural links between the brain and the hand in our quest for progress.